Planning for my pc going boom

[Lindal Kidd]

2 hours ago, ErukaVonD said:

I am Asus tech support irl and i would never recommend it to anybody lol

Now that is interesting!  I've used ASUS boards and peripherals, and an ASUS laptop, and have had excellent experiences with just about all of it.

What brand WOULD you recommend?

[rasterscan]

One tip from me Garnett

SSD hard drive if can.

Edited February 5, 2020 by rasterscan

[Lyssa Greymoon]

Four years? That’s barely broken in. Except for the mechanical hard drive. I’d do a surface scan of it, if the hard drive scan comes up with bad sectors, replace it. Samsung has some kind of utility for their SSDs that will tell you their health and whether or not it’s time to replace it. Definitely blow the dust out like everyone said.

[cheesecurd]

8 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Four years? That’s barely broken in. Except for the mechanical hard drive. I’d do a surface scan of it, if the hard drive scan comes up with bad sectors, replace it. Samsung has some kind of utility for their SSDs that will tell you their health and whether or not it’s time to replace it. Definitely blow the dust out like everyone said.

Crystaldiskmark for rough info, Passmark disk checkup for SMART info

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/

https://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup/

 

[Pixie Kobichenko]

16 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

My 2cents, stick with Asus and do NOT go to msi.

I used Asus with 4 builds with no problems. Went with msi on the latest and had to get an ethernet card and sound card because the driver's provided by msi to this day cause muffled sound and erratic, slow dl/ul speeds.

I was going to advise against MSI myself.  Dec 2018 hubby bought one for me from Best Buy & immediately had problems with it.  Immediately as in the very first day.   I tried running updates on it for about three days but the problems kept repeating themselves even after restoring to factory settings. It was returned by the fourth day. Don’t really have any suggestions on what to actually buy but I am Definitely another vote against MSI.

[cheesecurd]

If you’re going to buy an expensive gaming laptop, get a nice one. Not consumer tier brands but something above them on the manufacturer chain

ie: Clevo or Elultroniks, the people who make the baseline for all gaming laptops 

Or if you can use Linux, System76 will make laptops that will likely survive a direct nuclear blast while you’re playing SL. 
 

Or, as a third option, look into current gen workstations. You pay more on average than a consumer gaming laptop but just the same as I can recommend a 9 year old Thinkpad, they last, forever. Something like a Thinkpad P53 is the current gen, 15” professional workstation. But you’re looking at display panels that are calibrated for color accuracy in adobe software, mobile Intel Xeon processors, they support up to 128gb of ddr4 (I think, or maybe the P73 17” model does) and a mobile Quadro RTX 5000. With lots of options of course. A topped out model is like $4000, but even the entry level one is still a 9th gen i5 and a 4gb Quadro T1000, not a mechanical hard drive in sight.

As I’ve said above, there’s a reason why there’s still tens of thousands of decade old laptops on eBay, they don’t die. A modern high end Thinkpad will last you forever. Or at the minimum at least for a decade.

You don’t exactly see a bunch of msi, asus and alienware 2nd gen gaming laptops out there, those mobile Fermi video cards didn’t age well and if the things didn’t roast themselves to death then the overal build quality didn’t last the test of time.

Back to your machine though, it would be worth sinking some time and effort into doing some maintenance. It’s haswell/devils canyon and a 980, it will continue to run SL great but it’s probably time for a complete “rebuild”. Clean the hell out of it, re-paste the cpu cooler. If it has a liquid cooler it’s time to replace it with something else because AIOs tend to internally corrode and lose fluid over time. Back up everything and replace all your drives with new SSD’s, 1000gb Crucial MX500’s like in my laptop are about 100$ on Amazon. 
If your fans are crappy and noisy, get new fans. Arctic F12’s are about 8$ or 21$ for a 3 pack and are entirely silent. 

None of this stuff is super complicated, there’s guides online for anything you could need to do to a PC. 

[kali Wylder]

On 2/5/2020 at 10:40 AM, Lucia Nightfire said:

My 2cents, stick with Asus and do NOT go to msi.

I used Asus with 4 builds with no problems. Went with msi on the latest and had to get an ethernet card and sound card because the driver's provided by msi to this day cause muffled sound and erratic, slow dl/ul speeds.

I don't know much about the technical side of things these days but I've been very happy with 3 Asus lappys so far. They've all been good enough to handle SL's challenges.

[Mother Mystic]

On 2/6/2020 at 12:20 AM, Lindal Kidd said:

Now that is interesting!  I've used ASUS boards and peripherals, and an ASUS laptop, and have had excellent experiences with just about all of it.

What brand WOULD you recommend?

I'd say just like in my first comment, probably MSI. Maybe Razer, huge maybe.. 

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

We have a couple of ThinkPads and those are very durable machines.  Had one for 8 years with no issues. Plus we have a docking station for it hooked to a dual monitor setup and external SSD drive.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

What everyone says. The 4 GHz Intel i7, 16 Gb DDR3 and Nvidia RTX 2060 should be fine for SL for years to come. Just keep on saving for a nice new rig for a few more years. Any gaming laptop will not be worth it, compared to what you have now.

If there's anything too slow in SL to your liking, it might be a dusty machine, or messy hard drive (try keep your main SSD 50% or less full) or too many mesh objects and too many layered alpha textures near your avatar.

If many different games crash, try underclocking your graphics card with MSI Afterburner. 

https://www.msi.com/page/afterburner